ABSTRACT
For a long period I rejected such comments without giving them much consideration. My own experience from doing interviews and participant observation with people of different ages, was that studying children was nothing special. Therefore, in my view, there was no need to discuss matters of methodology with particular reference to young informants. Increasingly I have however reached the conclusion that some issues are worthy of attention. My interest is not directed primarily to questions of method in a narrow sense, as techniques, but to the broader issues of how knowledge arises in the research process, and in particular to our own role as research instruments. The study of children and childhood seems to confront us with a twofold challenge with regard to the problem of ethnocentrism. Like other researchers sharing a culture, we risk being ethnocentric. Because we are positioned within that culture as occupying adult roles, notably in families, we may have difficulty in obtaining the necessary distance to reflect on adult ways of conceptualizing children and childhood.
